Tag: impermanence

Life changes – it doesn’t mean you are doing it wrong

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The world we are born into is imperfect and unpredictable, sometimes disappointing.  Things change suddenly. We can have a clear plan for some days or a settled direction for our life and then suddenly something surprises us, moving in an opposite direction to what seemed right before. There is much to take in, and our ability to predict what can happen is quite limited. We frequently try to anticipate and maintain some order in our lives, and to remain immune from the inevitable changes that can assail us. When we fail,  we can sometimes find that our moods change – an automatic reaction to things not going  the way we had foreseen. Furthermore, we live with finite human beings who send mixed messages, make mistakes,  and sometimes disappoint us by not acting in the way that we expected.

These changes always seem to catch us by surprise, as if we expect the default position in life to be its predictability. However, if we look around at nature these days we do not get any support for that thesis. It does not behave in predictable ways –  surprisingly mild in Autumn here, while snow falls early in New York and waters flood Bangkok. The television news presents all these as sudden unexpected upheavals, as if some predictable pattern was supposed to be the norm in nature. However we should not really be surprised that calamities and turmoil happen in nature  – or in our inner life –  since this is the nature of the existence  we are born into.

Wisdom comes if we can understand that difficulties are inevitable in this life and when we try to work with them rather than run away from them. It has been shown that the human brain prefers continuity, so change is often accompanied by fear. And often what are we afraid of a lot of the time is the unknown. Meditation invites us to work with the unknown future in whatever form it comes up, no matter how unexpected. We know that we have a choice to be mindful. Whether it is the ongoing economic and currency crisis, or extreme weather conditions, or changes in a relationship, all can be an opportunity for us to work with reality.

Mindfulness tells us that can train our minds to turn these unfavorable circumstances around to make them work to our advantage. It helps us to work with difficulties rather than allowing them to force us into a corner with no answers. Even though it is part of our conditioning to resist change – to hold on to what we label “good” and push away what we label as “bad” – practice helps to see that change is inevitable and that the real suffering comes from resisting it. Thus we try to treat difficulties as just part of nature rather than signs that things have gone wrong. Mindfulness helps us avoid the trap of thinking that the meaning of life is just to get everything working the way we want it. It adapts the mind to life’s realities, and not the other way round.

Moods dictate my behaviour. If something makes me feel good, I want to have it. If it makes me feel bad, I want to get rid of it; if it leaves me indifferent, I ignore it. I find myself in a perpetual state of conflict, emotionally pulled one way and pushed the other. Yet underpinning attraction and aversion is craving: the childish and utopian thirst for a situation in which I finally possess everything I desire and I have repelled everything I dislike. Deep down I insist that a permanent, separate self is entitled to a life removed from the contingencies and uncertainties of existence. 

Stephen Batchelor, Buddhism without Beliefs

Breaking down our identification with what is passing…

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Awareness watches the sensations that occur with the natural coming and going of the breath. When we bring attention to the level of sensation, we are not so entangled in the verbal level where all the voices of thought hold sway, usually lost in the “internal dialogue.” The internal dialogue is always commenting and judging and planning. It contains a lot of thoughts of self, a lot of self-consciousness. It blocks the light of our natural wisdom; it limits our seeing who we are; it makes a lot of noise and attracts our attention to a fraction of the reality in which we exist. But when the awareness is one-pointedly focused on the coming and going of the breath, all the other aspects of the mind/body process come automatically, clearly into focus as they arise. Meditation puts us into direct contact – which means direct experience – with more of who we are.

We see how thoughts we took to be “me” or “mine” are just an ongoing process. This perspective helps break our deep identification with the seeming solid reality of the movie of the mind. As we become less engrossed in the melodrama, we see it’s just flow, and can watch it all as it passes. We are not even drawn into the action by the passing of a judgmental comment or an agitated moment of impatience. When we simply see  – moment to moment  – what’s occurring, observing without judgment or preference, we don’t get lost thinking, “I prefer this moment to that moment, I prefer this pleasant thought to that pain in my knee.” As we begin developing this choiceless awareness, what starts coming within the field of awareness is quite remarkable: we start seeing the root from which thought arises.

Stephen Levine, A Gradual Awakening

Ghost Stories at Halloween

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A repost quote from this time last year, reminding us that the mind creates a lot of the dramas in our lives, often making them more frightening than they actually are. These dramas can be about the big and little matters of this day – the days getting darker and winter approaching, the traffic heavier, the relentless nature of work, a difficult meeting…the possibilities are endless. Recognizing that the feelings that these events provoke are simply “mind energies” helps us to work with them and not to give them as much substance as we normally would.

We create big problems for ourselves by not recognizing mind energies when they arrive dressed up as ghosts. They are like the neighbor’s children disguised as Halloween ghosts. When we open the door and find the child next door dressed in a sheet, even though it looks like a ghost, we remember it is simply the child next door. And when I remember the dramas of my life are the energies of the mind dressed up in the sheet of a story, I manage them more gracefully.

Sylvia Boorstein

Sunday Quote: Every end is a beginning

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Our life is an apprenticeship to the truth that around every circle another can be drawn;

that there is no end in nature, but every end is a beginning,

and under every deep a lower deep opens

Ralph Waldo Emerson

…. and the self is continually changing…

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Some similar reflections, this time from a neuroscientific point of view:

Now we come to perhaps the single greatest source of suffering  –  the apparent self. Look into your own experience. When you take things personally –  or hunger for approval –  what happens? You suffer. When you identify with something as “me” or try to possess something as “mine,” you set yourself up for suffering, since all things are frail and will inevitably pass away. When you stand apart from other people and the world as “I,” you feel separate and vulnerable  – and suffer. On the other hand, when you relax the subtle sense of contraction at the very nub of “me” –  when you’re immersed in the flow of life rather than standing apart from it, when ego and egotism fade to the background  –  then you feel more peaceful and fulfilled. 

The experiences of self you just had — that it has many aspects, is just part of the whole person, is continually changing, and varies according to conditions — depend on the physical substrates of self in your brain. Thoughts, feelings, images, and so on exist as patterns of information represented by patterns of neural structure and activity. In the same way, the various aspects of the apparent self – and the intimate and powerful experience of being a self – exist as patterns in the mind and brain. The many aspects of self are based on structures and processes spread throughout the brain and nervous system, and embedded in the body’s interactions with the world.….In sum, from a neurological standpoint, the everyday sense of being a unified self is an utter illusion: the apparently coherent and solid “I” is actually built from many subsystems and sub-subsystems over the course of development, with no fixed center, and the most fundamental basis of the sense of “I”  –  subjectivity  –  emerges in the field of interactions the body has with the world.

Rich Hansen, Buddha’s Brain : The Practical Neuroscience of Happiness, Love, and Wisdom

Life is full of transitions; we are always moving on….

Karl Duffy1 Comment

What story are you telling yourself about your life?

As humans we seem to have a deep desire to settle down – in a sense to make a home – where we feel safe, and where we can, in some way, define ourselves. We like to have a narrative of stability, which unfolds sometimes without conscious reflection –  an implicit psychological imperative to hold onto a continuity across time and space. Therefore, we unconsciously stretch out a subjective thread across our experiences, telling our story in terms of coherence and unity – seeing certain periods as deviations or moments we got lost – and this continuity gives us an “identity”.  Indeed, in Western societies, one of the first questions a person tends to get asked is “What do you do?” – meaning, “What is your job?”  – as that allows everyone present to define themselves in terms of something ongoing, and thus gives a kind of identity or something to hold a story together. Continuity is important to us, we do not like any sense of dislocation. We like stories that flow; they seem to give us some sort of comfort.

However, even though we like continuity, I increasingly wonder whether it would not be better to tell our stories as ones of ongoing movement, of continual transitions, and practice being comfortable with that. Last week I was involved in a workshop on Mindfulness as part of a Counselling Conference held in Geneva on the theme of transitions. And as I listened to the talks I was struck by how much of our life is actually changing,  all the time,  in big and little ways.  Life brings innumerable goodbyes, as even on a daily level we can be reminded of little ways that we or others have changed. We are always making little adjustments, little departures. We have to say goodbye to life phases, to certain life patterns, to some memories we have let define us. And because we prefer a narrative of settling down, of attachment to a place or to ideas about ourselves, it is inevitable that departures cause anxiety. But if we come to see that life consists of change, and each change contains a promise of something new, then we can work with our anxieties from a new perspective. Defining ourselves as people who change, and seeing this fluidity as part of our story, allows us rest more easily with the inevitable changes which happen and not see them as a threat to who we are.

The real art of conducting consists in transitions – Gustav Mahler. In our normal narrative we prefer to talk about continuity. This quote  prompts us to go even further. Not only can we become comfortable with change, but maybe even find a richness in the in-between moments, the gaps between sounds, those moments in our lives when we feel a little bit on shaky ground  or the spaces in our lives when we can feel nothing is happening. Sometimes, we understand things better through their absence or we only appreciate something when we are forced to examine it more closely. Maybe the moments of change which produce anxiety,  are the moments which help us to live our lives more consciously, as we reflect on what we have allowed define us. They may be hard, but if we trust that something rich is happening, we may find more strength to go those periods when everything familiar seems far away.

Life is a process of becoming, a combination of states we have to go through.  Where people fail is that they wish to elect a state and remain in it. This is a kind of death.

Anais Nin